Since then, Ekizian says, "volunteer curators" in two dozen countries have been busily supplementing the US census data that is a major source of its intelligence. Ekizian won't disclose how many people have forked out for it.Īt WolframAlpha's launch, it didn't take a particularly obscure question to find the limits of the machine's knowledge. It is selling an iPhone version of WolframAlpha for a hefty US$50 ($67). That's not the only way Wolfram Research is making money. Non-disclosure agreements prevent him from saying more - except that further licensing deals of the Microsoft sort will be made public in the next month or so. "We have long-standing relationships with practically every company in the business," Ekizian says, including Google. He made it clear, however, that it won't be an exclusive arrangement. Whereas they - and No2 search engine Yahoo, with which Microsoft did a 10-year technology and revenue-sharing deal in July - make money by selling ads around search results, WolframAlpha aims to pay its way through licensing deals.Ī spokesman for the US-based company, John Ekizian, wouldn't say what terms have been agreed with Microsoft. But compete Google and Microsoft certainly do. Popular Science magazine last week gave WolframAlpha its 2009 computing innovation gong. The algorithms are derived from Mathematica, a computation program Stephen Wolfram developed a couple of decades ago, and the data has been vetted and input by Wolfram Research staff. But when a query is typed in, it attempts to interpret it in the context of "trillions of pieces of data" and "tens of thousands of algorithms" to deliver live output. WolframAlpha might give it some justification to the claim, however. Microsoft's strategy is to refer to Bing as a "decision engine" rather than a search engine, even if that's exactly what it looks like. One of the first rules of battle with a dominant opponent is to pretend you're not competing in the same market. The famously brainy British Wolfram - who had a PhD by 20 - replied: "We do mathematics!"Īrithmetic is clearly more Gates' subject - he worked out that a tie-up with Wolfram Research would help Microsoft in its market-share fight with Google. "What, is that right?" Gates is alleged to have said when WolframAlpha creator Stephen Wolfram gave him a demo of the "computational knowledge machine" in the lead-up to the deal. According to Wolfram Research blogger Schoeller Porter, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was a little incredulous when he saw the calculation done. WolframAlpha correctly understands the problem as 2 to the power of 65,536.Ĭonfused? Me too - but it is a big number, and we're apparently in good company. Typing the query directly into WolframAlpha, meanwhile, returns a rather larger number - beginning with 2, followed by 19,728 digits. Worse, Bing gave me the wrong answer, 65,536 - the result you get if you raise 2 to the power of 16. When I tried it out on the day of the announcement last Thursday, it wasn't yet working. For example, if you type "2^2^2^2^2" (^ means "to the power of") into Bing, it's supposed to dash off to WolframAlpha and come back with the result. Last week the two - which, like every other search technology, live in the shadow of Google - moved together a little for comfort.īing has done a deal to use WolframAlpha to answer queries relating to health, nutrition and advanced mathematics. The two big web search announcements of the year were the launch of WolframAlpha by Wolfram Research in mid-May and Microsoft's Bing a couple of weeks later.
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